Corduroy Orange

I know for a fact that this sauce goes great with grilled salmon or with a potato and cheese omelette. Chilled, it’s an excellent salad dressing. I’m planning on using it with pasta and roasted zucchini for a light, summery entree; it would likely also be good as something to dunk a grilled cheese sandwich into. Quite frankly, it would probably go well with just about anything you’d eat a tomato with.

I pureed this sauce with my immersion blender, but if you don’t have one, a regular blender would do just fine. In fact, it would probably yield a smoother sauce with fewer visible chunks of basil.

(more…)

Here’s something else to do with the streusel topping you made for the pretentious blueberry muffins. It’s delicious for any meal of the day–especially breakfast. If someone tells you that pie’s not a breakfast food, have them consider the main ingredients: fresh fruit and oatmeal. Yeah, all right, there’s a fair amount of sugar in there, too–but I guarantee you that it’s a more wholesome breakfast choice than a toaster pastry and that it’s both tastier and lower in preservatives than a breakfast bar.

(more…)

Take another look at the grilled peaches post before you try to follow it. I went back and revisited my work and realized that my instructions needed improvement on a couple of points:

• Putting the peach face down over the coals won’t work if the fire is still vibrant. Within three and a half minutes, the entire face of the peach may be singed.
• The peel of the peach detracts from the overall texture of the finished product.

Thankfully, fixing these problems is easy. I have ammended the original post to reflect that the peach ought to be placed peel side down over the live coals, but a close eye should be kept on the peach while it is here, and it shouldn’t stay over the live coals for too long. The peach should then be moved to the cool side of the grill and placed cut side down to finish, turning it to install hatch marks. Before removing the peach from the grill, remove the peel. Once the peach is cooked, it should come off quite easily: just grab an edge of it with your tongs and pull away slowly, the entirety of the peel should come off smoothly.

Happy grilling!

What? you ask, How can there be anything pretentious about so simple a dish as a blueberry muffin? Easy– the name of this dish wrote itself as I started to explain how the recipe came about:

So, the other day I decided to make blueberry muffins to take to my lawn bowling league but it turned out that I was practically out of cow’s milk. I just happened to have some goat’s milk on hand, though, so I used some of it in place of the normal milk.

Now, come on, who just happens to have goat’s milk on hand? That’s so ridiculous of a statement as to be, well, pretentious. But the truth of it is when I was shopping at the food co-op, I got held up in the dairy section for an extended stay while my wife investigated odor removers to eliminate the dog smell from our new used couch. I started poking around my options and thought, well, I like goat cheese, but I wonder what the milk tastes like–so I snuck it into the cart when she wasn’t looking.

As it turns out, goat’s milk goes quite well with blueberries. It adds a certain, subtle tanginess to the muffin that otherwise wouldn’t be there. My tasters at the lawn bowling league all thought the muffins were fantastic. They kept asking, “What’s in here?”  They’d say, “These muffins are great, did you put applesauce in here?”  

I had forgotten about the whole milk debacle so I couldn’t even ‘fess up about the secret ingredient, but that’s OK because I’m coming clean right here on the web for all the world to see. And I know that chances are you probably won’t just have goat’s milk on hand that you can use to make these muffins for breakfast tomorrow, but trust me–if you’ve got a chance to get some goat’s milk, it’s worth it just to make these muffins. (more…)

I love fresh peaches. I cobble ‘em, I crisp ‘em, I pie ‘em, I eat ‘em up while I can. Now, I grill ‘em, too, and damn, they’re tasty! Even better, they can be a side dish to a pork chop just as easily as they can be a dessert. They’re easy, too– they prep in mere minutes, and cook at about the same rate as zucchini, give or take, depending on the coals.

The spices I coat them with are a general baking mix I use on most fruits. I adjust the proportions and sometimes add or drop an ingredient, depending on the specific task at hand, but I don’t bother mixing up a big of a batch of it. Instead, I just keep all the ingredients together, and shake them out each time. That way, I’m better able to adjust the ratios as need be.

(more…)

Thanks for this wonderful blog Jesse. I have a question for you, when cooking Chef Boyardee, is the stove top or the microwave more preferred? Also, should the canned parmesan cheese be added before or after cooking? I hope to resolve conflicts that root back from my childhood.

Thanks,
Chris in New Orleans
Dear Chris:

Quite frankly, canned pasta is crap. You’d be much better off cooking yourself dried pasta and heating some sauce out of a jar to go with it. Nutritionally, you’d be cutting a fair amount of unnecessary sodium from your meal; tastewise, you’d be entering the world of adulthood.

The best way to make your adult-style meal of pasta with marinara sauce is to put on a large pot of boiling water (1 gallon of water per pound of pasta being cooked; for a single serving, estimate about 1/4- 1/3 pound pasta). Meanwhile, slice up some onions and some garlic to jazz up your marinara.

Put a small saucepan on medium heat and let it get hot. Drizzle a little bit of oil on the bottom of the pan (enough to liberally cover the bottom). Add a few cranks worth of freshly cracked black pepper, then add your onion (about 1/2 small onion per serving, give or take). Stir the onion around the hot oil with a wooden spoon until it starts to soften up a bit, then add your garlic and a pinch or two of salt. When the garlic starts to brown, add your pasta sauce into the pan and stir it to incorporate the garlic and onion. As the sauce gets hotter, you might want to turn the heat down just a bit to avoid splatters.

When your sauce is pretty much hot and your water is boiling, add your dried pasta to the water. Check the package for cooking directions because different shapes of pasta have different cooking times, but in general you can expect it to take 5-10 minutes to be al dente.

When the pasta is cooked, drain it through a collander and return it to the pan it was cooked in. Add as much sauce as you think is enough and toss it around with the pasta. This would be the proper time to add the parmesan cheese, but don’t feel limited by the stuff in the green can. Especially if you’re trying to impress a date, go for the wedge of aged parmesan and grate it by hand into the pasta. It’s a classy touch.